In the shadow of ``ethnic cleansing'' and rigid nationalism, a noted academic literary critic examines exemplary creations of the ``plural self'' and urges an extension of the private ironies of ``postmodern subjectivity'' into the public sphere. Suleiman (Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant- Garde, not reviewed) studies authors and artists who live ``between'' safely fixed categories: between national identities (memoirs of Holocaust survivors and war refugees, including the Hungarian-born author herself); between motherhood and creativity (Mary Gordon, Rosellen Brown, Toni Morrison); between languages (Christine Brooke-Rose, HÇläne Cixous); between love of male peers and irritation at their debasing idealizations (Leonora Carrington). Among autobiographies she favors ``the kind that tries to recover, through writing, an irrecoverable absence,'' a mother tongue for the uprooted and decentered. Although Suleiman is an acute reader of playful novelists like Angela Carter, most of her subjects have been gravely ``hurt into poetry.'' Interested in the beautiful and the beautifully ugly, Suleiman is drawn to literature and visual art that offers ``disruptive, painful self-exposure and self-exploration.'' She is a prober of wounds, including her own, when a Chicana reader faults her for class-bound views on author- mothers (the letter and its cogent rejoinder are reprinted here), or when she confronts the much-admired Simone de Beauvoir's dubious war conduct. Suleiman argues, finally, in contrast to thinkers like Richard Rorty, for an essential continuity between public and private spheres. Pinning future salvation to the inculcation of ``divided loyalties,'' she asserts that such divisions would create tolerance by instilling an awareness of how many conflicting interests each of us is made of. The admittedly utopian-sounding proposal she leaves us with is this: ``Since public rhetorics of certainty... don't seem to have worked all that well... why not try a public rhetoric of doubt?'' Detailed, generous analyses of complex artists, buttressed by lucid cultural speculation.
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-674-77301-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.
A revealing biography of the fabled Manhattan hotel, in which generations of artists and writers found a haven.
Turn-of-the century New York did not lack either hotels or apartment buildings, writes Tippins (February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America, 2005). But the Chelsea Hotel, from its very inception, was different. Architect Philip Hubert intended the elegantly designed Chelsea Association Building to reflect the utopian ideals of Charles Fourier, offering every amenity conducive to cooperative living: public spaces and gardens, a dining room, artists’ studios, and 80 apartments suitable for an economically diverse population of single workers, young couples, small families and wealthy residents who otherwise might choose to live in a private brownstone. Hubert especially wanted to attract creative types and made sure the building’s walls were extra thick so that each apartment was quiet enough for concentration. William Dean Howells, Edgar Lee Masters and artist John Sloan were early residents. Their friends (Mark Twain, for one) greeted one another in eight-foot-wide hallways intended for conversations. In its early years, the Chelsea quickly became legendary. By the 1930s, though, financial straits resulted in a “down-at-heel, bohemian atmosphere.” Later, with hard-drinking residents like Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, the ambience could be raucous. Arthur Miller scorned his free-wheeling, drug-taking, boozy neighbors, admitting, though, that the “great advantage” to living there “was that no one gave a damn what anyone else chose to do sexually.” No one passed judgment on creativity, either. But the art was not what made the Chelsea famous; its residents did. Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Phil Ochs and Sid Vicious are only a few of the figures populating this entertaining book.
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-618-72634-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.
Photographer and author Stanton returns with a companion volume to Humans of New York (2013), this one with similarly affecting photographs of New Yorkers but also with some tales from his subjects’ mouths.
Readers of the first volume—and followers of the related site on Facebook and elsewhere—will feel immediately at home. The author has continued to photograph the human zoo: folks out in the streets and in the parks, in moods ranging from parade-happy to deep despair. He includes one running feature—“Today in Microfashion,” which shows images of little children dressed up in various arresting ways. He also provides some juxtapositions, images and/or stories that are related somehow. These range from surprising to forced to barely tolerable. One shows a man with a cat on his head and a woman with a large flowered headpiece, another a construction worker proud of his body and, on the facing page, a man in a wheelchair. The emotions course along the entire continuum of human passion: love, broken love, elation, depression, playfulness, argumentativeness, madness, arrogance, humility, pride, frustration, and confusion. We see varieties of the human costume, as well, from formalwear to homeless-wear. A few celebrities appear, President Barack Obama among them. The “stories” range from single-sentence comments and quips and complaints to more lengthy tales (none longer than a couple of pages). People talk about abusive parents, exes, struggles to succeed, addiction and recovery, dramatic failures, and lifelong happiness. Some deliver minirants (a neuroscientist is especially curmudgeonly), and the children often provide the most (often unintended) humor. One little boy with a fishing pole talks about a monster fish. Toward the end, the images seem to lead us toward hope. But then…a final photograph turns the light out once again.
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05890-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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